“It pleased Providence to bring us through many hair-breadth escapes, with our craniums uncracked; and when we considher that he, on taking a retrogradation of his past life, can indulge in the plasing recollection of having broken two skulls in his fighting days, and myself one, without either of us getting a fracture in return, I think we have both rason to be thankful.  He was a powerful bulliah battha * in his day and never met a man able to fight him, except big Mucldemurray, who stood before him the greater part of an hour and a half, in the fair of Knockimdowny, on the day that the first great fight took place—­twenty years afther the hard, frost—­between the O’Callaghans and the O’Hallaghans.  The two men fought single hands—­for both factions were willing to let them try the engagement out, that they might see what side could boast of having the best man.  They began where you enter the north side of Knockimdowny, and fought successively up to the other end, then back again to the spot where they commenced, and afterwards up to the middle of the town, right opposite to the market-place, where my grandfather, by the same a-token, lost a grinder; but he soon took satisfaction for that, by giving Mucldemurray a tip above the eye with the end of an oak stick, dacently loaded with lead, which made the poor man feel very quare entirely, for the few days that he survived it.

     * Literally the stroke of a cudgel; put for cudgel-player.

“Faith, if an Irishman happened to be born in Scotland, he would find it mighty inconvanient—­afther losing two or three grinders in a row—­to manage the hard oaten bread that they use there; for which rason, God be good to his sowl that first invented the phaties, anyhow, because a man can masticate them without a tooth, at all at all.  I’ll engage, if larned books were consulted, it would be found out that he was an Irishman.  I wonder that neither Pastorini nor Columbkill mentions anything about him in their prophecies concerning the church; for my own part, I’m strongly inclinated to believe that it must have been Saint Patrick himself; and I think that his driving all kinds of venomous reptiles out of the kingdom is, according to the Socrastic method of argument, an undeniable proof of it.  The subject, to a dead certainty, is not touched upon in the Brehon Code,* nor by any of the three Psalters,** which is extremely odd, seeing that the earth never produced a root equal to it in the multiplying force of prolification.  It is, indeed, the root of prosperity to a fighting people:  and many a time my grandfather boasts to this day, that the first bit of bread he ever ett was a phatie.

     * This was the old code of laws peculiar to Ireland before
     the introduction of English legislation into it.